Every bit of this friendly inconsequence is meant merely to preface my intention for writing at all.

You once said to me — in response to something vague I’d said about wanting to take pride in my work, and that if I were ever asked to confess my ambition, that this would be it — well, I won’t quote you, as I don’t quite remember the words, and your economical choice is always greater than my verbal buffet, but I vividly recall you bristling at this idea, of pride itself, not merely mine or whatever semblance of such I might find. Our cups were drained and the time against us, so we didn’t at the time explore this further. Indeed, though we have never since, I think, continued this conversation, it has stayed with me. Sometimes as a corrective, other times a challenge.

Yesterday, I found myself in a similarly themed give and take, without the tea and scone, about the distinction between pride and self-satisfaction. I wondered aloud, as I’m wont to do, often to the annoyance of people who’d prefer to wander away, about the fact that pride isn’t something one simply “has,” like a favorite chair or pen, but something one can, illicitly even, take. Or, for that matter, something one might even chance to “give” — to loan away, like a favorite book, and maybe never see unsoiled again. Self-satisfaction, though, I continued, without even the aid of alcohol (it was midday after all), doesn’t it, I wondered rhetorically, come overburdened with a sense of something terminal — in the various senses of the word I won’t needlessly list — all of which, though, indicating one’s arrival at a destination and nowhere else to go?

(Mind you, I was also recklessly weaving in a sexual metaphor, about masturbation, but I’ll leave your imagination, should it wish, to trace the rabbit trails blazed, and whether they lead only to yet more rabbits.)

Why am I sharing this with you now? Oh, I don’t know . . . I really don’t. Every bit of this friendly inconsequence is meant merely to preface my intention for writing at all.

I hope you are well.

B.

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§ 2 Responses to Every bit of this friendly inconsequence is meant merely to preface my intention for writing at all.

I so want this to be a dialog with oneself, for I have struggled with at least a portion of it, frighteningly familiar in its detail. ((I think I feel the same way about shame, somewhere within, I bristle.))